BasicCard is a smart card

Smart card

A smart card, chip card, or integrated circuit card , is any pocket-sized card with embedded integrated circuits. A smart card or microprocessor cards contain volatile memory and microprocessor components. The card is made of plastic, generally polyvinyl chloride, but sometimes acrylonitrile...

 programmable in the ZC-Basic

BASIC

BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....

 language. The (free) BasicCard Toolkit offers an API

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

 to quickly program the terminal side and the card side of the application. The API hides the complexity of ISO/IEC 7816 protocols. It also provides APIs for Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 and .NET

.NET Framework

The .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large library and supports several programming languages which allows language interoperability...

. BasicCard smart cards are only manufactured by ZeitControl.

BasicCards features

There are 4 types of BasicCard: Compact, Enhanced, Professional, and MultiApplication.

• EEPROM
  EEPROM
  EEPROM stands for Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory and is a type of non-volatile memory used in computers and other electronic devices to store small amounts of data that must be saved when power is removed, e.g., calibration...
  
  : 1KB to 60KB
• RAM
  Ram
  -Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
  
  : 256 bytes to 2.9KB
• Cryptography
  Cryptography
  Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
  
   algorithms: SG-LFSR
  Shrinking generator
  In cryptography, the shrinking generator is a form of pseudorandom number generator intended to be used in a stream cipher. It was published in Crypto 1993 by Don Coppersmith, Hugo Krawczyk, and Yishay Mansour....
  
  , DES
  Data Encryption Standard
  The Data Encryption Standard is a block cipher that uses shared secret encryption. It was selected by the National Bureau of Standards as an official Federal Information Processing Standard for the United States in 1976 and which has subsequently enjoyed widespread use internationally. It is...
  
  , Triple DES
  Triple DES
  In cryptography, Triple DES is the common name for the Triple Data Encryption Algorithm block cipher, which applies the Data Encryption Standard cipher algorithm three times to each data block....
  
  , AES
  Advanced Encryption Standard
  Advanced Encryption Standard is a specification for the encryption of electronic data. It has been adopted by the U.S. government and is now used worldwide. It supersedes DES...
  
   128-192-256 bits, RSA up to 4096 bits, Elliptic curve
  Elliptic curve cryptography
  Elliptic curve cryptography is an approach to public-key cryptography based on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields. The use of elliptic curves in cryptography was suggested independently by Neal Koblitz and Victor S...
  
   161-512 bits, SHA-1, SHA-256, EAX
  EAX mode
  EAX mode is a mode of operation for cryptographic block ciphers. It is an Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data algorithm designed to simultaneously provide both authentication and privacy of the message with a two-pass scheme, one pass for achieving privacy and one for authenticity for...
  
  , OMAC
  One-key MAC
  OMAC is a message authentication code constructed from a block cipher much like the PMAC algorithm.Officially there are two OMAC algorithms which are both essentially the same except for a small tweak....
  
  
• Random number generator: pseudo RNG or hardware RNG
• IEEE Floating point
  IEEE floating-point standard
  IEEE 754–1985 was an industry standard for representingfloating-pointnumbers in computers, officially adopted in 1985 and superseded in 2008 byIEEE 754-2008. During its 23 years, it was the most widely used format for...
  
  arithmetic
• T=0, T=1, and contactless smart card protocols
• Directory-based file system
• Single-application and multi-application support

External links

• http://zeitcontrol.de/basic.htm
• http://www.basiccard.com/
• BasicCard Developer Manual
• A course on BasicCard (in french)
• A Linux/FreeBSD API for BasicCards